If you stop by this blog often, you’ll remember that I wrote a post last week advocating the idea that in order to form a culture of discipleship in the local church, we should preach and teach our baptismal vows instead of relying solely on our membership vows to the job. I got a lot of great feedback through a number of forums including the comment section on this blog, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, there was so much mixed feedback I feel the need to come back with a follow up post on the topic.

Baptismal Vows and Membership Vows: A Review

Our Baptismal Vows are as follows:

1. Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?2. Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?3. Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the Church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races?

**According to the grace given you, will you remain faithful members of Christ’s holy Church and serve as Christ’s representatives in the world? [More on this one later…]

And our Membership Vows:

As members of Christ’s universal Church, will you be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church, and do all in your power to strengthen its ministries? [Membership Vows for the UMC]

Will you participate in the ministries of this church with your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service, and your witness? [Membership Vows for the local congregation]

Addressing the Criticism

I had a number of people question the necessity of rooting a ministry of discipleship in our baptismal vows. One of the common responses went something like this: “If people actually their vows of membership seriously, then we wouldn’t have a discipleship problem.”

I’d like to address that comment with some follow up thoughts…

First, I should remind readers that in order to make the case for the importance of baptismal vows I had to argue they were at least as important if not more important than our membership vows. By no means do I think we should do away with the vows of membership to the local church. This is not an either/or sort of thing. I’m simply saying that our current culture has not done an adequate job of forming disciples when we’re talking only about what it means to be a member in a local church. Doubling down on a system that’s already proven to yield a low capacity for discipleship doesn’t make sense. Adding an emphasis on baptismal vows as the basis for discipleship only enhances one’s life as a church member.

Secondly, membership vows alone are not enough to form Wesleyan disciples. If we’re honest with ourselves we know that we can be 100% active in our local church through prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness and remain nominally Christian. “Participating in the ministries of the church” is a far cry from the language of Wesleyan holiness. Agreeing to pray, be actively engaged in a local church, give of our financial gifts, and encouraging others to do likewise is not on the same level as renouncing and repenting of sin, accepting the grace to reject evil and injustice, and confessing Jesus as Lord. That doesn’t make membership vows something to scoff at. But it does remind us that are active members of a local church because we are first baptized into God’s mighty acts of salvation. The accountability we hold one another to should include whether or not we participate in the transformative ministries of our local church but it should not end there. Accountable discipleship asks whether or not we’re growing in grace, moving on towards perfection, and becoming more and more holy. Wesleyan disciples are active church members as a result of this journey towards entire sanctification.

This is precisely what it means to “remain faithful members of Christ’s holy Church and serve as Christ’s representatives in the world?”

A (Short) Personal Testimony

My daughter was baptized today during our 11:00 worship service. I had the great pleasure of not robing up as a preacher because it was more important I be a dad today. As my wife and I stood next to the font holding our daughter, I thought about the water inside and the precious life in my arms. Our senior pastor asked us — in front of about 350+ members of our local church family — the questions of baptism I wrote above. It occurred to me this was probably the first time since my confirmation that I had renewed my baptismal vows. So there I stood, before God and a full congregation as both pastor and dad, and I tried to answer each question in as best as I could — slowly and intentionally because I was not only answering for myself but also as a promise to raise my daughter likewise.

For me, discipleship must include a continual reminder of these vows of baptism because I refuse to set the bar so low as to let my daughter think that as long as she’s active in a local church everything is okay. I answered those questions knowing that one day she’ll answer them for herself. When that day comes I hope she knows that should not be the last time she hears those questions. Through the ups and downs of her life, I hope those questions echo in her ears just like I hope the waters of her baptism keep her feet a little damp no matter where she goes. If her baptism is to mean anything, it ought to mean that by God’s unfailing grace she’ll live into a life that seeks to model these vows. And in doing so, I hope she knows that also means she must be active and faithful to a local church. But that faithfulness comes out of the fact that on a day she can’t personally remember, her mom and dad stood before a group of folks and declared that, by grace, she would raised as a disciple of Jesus Christ come hell or high water. If even and ounce of that comes true two things will happen: First, she’ll know that grace alone is responsible; and secondly, there will be no question at all over if she’ll be active in a local church — by grace, that will come as a natural result.

“The Church’s first witness is the way we live before the eyes of the watching world.”

–John Howard Yoder [quoted on p. 87]

Kenda Creasy Dean cuts right the heart of the problem with the American church in this chapter:

“Every church is called to be a ‘missional church.’ The fact that we have turned the word ‘mission’ into an adjective testifies to the American church’s frayed ecclesiology. A nonmissional church is not a church in the first place, but in a culture largely void of a theological vocabulary, this language has become necessary to remind us that the church exists not for ourselves, but for the world.” [p. 89-90, bold emphasis mine]

As much as we like to quote the Great Commission as the mission of the Church, I worry sometimes if we “get it.” How easy is it to assume “making disciples” is the same thing as making church members? How easy is it to assume baptizing and teaching are the primary means by which we grow the church? What about the mission of God? Does the Church simply exist for itself and those within its walls?

Participating in God’s mission intrinsically links us to the life of Christ — a life given as a most radical act of grace, a life so bound up into our lives that absolutely nothing can separate us from him — and we’re called to respond by linking our lives to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. All of this is how we know and participate in the mission of God. And by the way, for the church to be missional, we have to see mission as more than just a trip.

Missional Principles

Dean uses the work of Andrew Walls to identify missional values consistent through Christian history. There are two main “missionary principles”:

Indiginizing Principle: Christ made his home among us, accepting us as we are, becoming “one of us,” fully translated in human terms, fully participating in human culture. In this way, Incarnation embodies God’s radical acceptance of humanity.

Pilgrim Principle: God’s radical challenge to us to follow Jesus — we are not merely accepted as we are, but we’re also called to become something new by the power of God. But this transformation requires us to relocate from our comfort zones.

The pilgrim’s job is to confess the good news of God in Jesus Christ. The pilgrim’s life is to become a testimony to the love and presence of God. The pilgrim’s job is to confess, not convince. This really challenged me when I came across this in reading this book. Maybe we ought to spend a little less time grandstanding on whatever the issue of the days is and spend a little more time authentically confessing the presence of God in our lives — a mysterious yet undeniable force that continually shapes us. The truth is, the more we confess, the better we’re able to see what we confess. As we practice looking for God’s active presence in our lives we gain new eyes to see the world around us and, eventually, new ears to hear the call to go further in the journey of discipleship.

Sometimes we’re called to faithfully wait as we hone these new eyes and ears. Being encountered by God is a big deal. It calls for a total life change in response. And this doesn’t happen over night. Even the disciples and gospel writers needed time to process what we heard and saw and how it transcended life as they knew it. As Dean puts it:

“It must have been part of what people remembered, and recounted, when they retold the story of that Easter night. In this moment of grace, of divine waiting…God remains with us. This paradoxical place, where Christ woos us as he waits for us, is marked by revelation, recognition, and rejoicing.” [p. 102]

Confession is not an easy thing. But we can’t get too absorbed by the temptation to convince others lest we forget that we don’t totally “get” when we’re talking about in the first place. It’s but for the grace of God that we’re able to even marginally comprehend what it means to confess Jesus Christ as Lord.

Recovering a Missional Imagination

“Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the unholy residue of a church that has lost its missional imagination. In stark contrast to institutions colonized by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, missional communities do not exist primarily to perpetuate themselves.” [p. 104]

It’s a mighty bold thing to say the church exists for the world. And in a time of decline across the church, it’s a mighty risky thing to declare that you want to be a missional community whose sole goal is to continually give yourself away for others. Funny thing is, that’s precisely what Jesus did! One of the problems Dean notes is that we, as the Church, teach MTD to young people and while it’s understandable, it’s not very compelling. Handing on the faith to young people is not a matter of “giving them Jesus” [p. 105]. Jesus isn’t “ours” to own and he’s surely not ours to give to others. The presence of God in the lives of our youth is not dependent on us — God is already with them before we ever get there. This is why we believe baptism is a public confession to the presence of God’s grace already at work in the lives of people. It’s our job to help them see what’s already at work in them. And maybe in the process we’ll rediscover that same presence in ourselves.

Making disciples requires incarnation — not cultural adaptation. Being real and authentic about our faith is much more important than trying to communicate using whatever new, hip language tools are at our disposal. Christian communities throughout the ages share certain qualities: we learn from the same sacred writings, pray to the same Triune God, use bread, wine, and water in the same meaningful ways, and we claim to somehow, by the power of the Holy Spirit, be connected to these communities around the world and throughout the ages. Incarnation is not about being relevant as much as it’s about being real — being real about who God is, who we are, and who we long to be together.

This missional spirit — the incarnational presence of God among us — eventually drives us to be more concerned with sending people out rather than roping them in. I suppose that’s the true meaning of Great Commission’s first command to “Go…”

As I’ve lamented before, the catch phrase of The United Methodist Church seems to be “making disciples for the transformation of the world.” I’ve lamented this because frankly it seems like this has replaced the old joke that “Jesus” is the answer to everything. Everything we do seems to call for the rubber stamp that what we’re doing is somehow “making disciples.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a local pastor, District Superintendent, or a Bishop, you feel the need to endorse everything you by justifying it as “making disciples.” In all of this, I contend that we continue to avoid the deeper question of “what does a disciple actually look like?” — but that’s a soapbox I’ll come back to (again) another day.

For today, I’d like to contend that in order to faithfully and effectively form disciples, we need to agree on a basic system that will act as the foundation for a culture of disciple formation. As Methodists know, we’re all about connection. And we often call layers of bureaucracy “connection” because we don’t like to admit that in many ways they function more on a bureaucratic level and less on a connectional level. Nonetheless, with many different parts and layers to our current system, we must try to (re)define the roles of everyone in the system if we want to effect the culture towards change (i.e. from our current system to a discipling system).

It’s NOT an Industrial Model

Disciple formation is not an industrial model where we somehow live in an assembly line model of doing things. Linear approaches to disciple formation often lack the ability to admit people rarely follow a neat and orderly process to becoming a disciple. Further, as Wesleyan Christians, we do not believe disciples are ever made — we are always in the process of being made. Approaching a discipling system by setting up models of universal starting points and ending points fails to meet people where they are. It also fails to recognize that context will also determine where we’re heading as disciples of Jesus Christ. After all, the call to discipleship is not one meant to make good church members — it’s a call to go into the world as new and different people.

The Role of Local Churches

The United Methodist Book of Discipline says:

“The local church provides the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs.” (par. 201)

If this is truly what we believe, then our greatest work as a connection as far as discipleship is concerned is to ensure that our local churches are able to do just that. Personally I believe this happens when local churches act as microcosmos for the church as a whole recognizing that people are at many different points in their faith journey. Some have heard the call to be disciples and want to do the work it takes to grow into a disciple. Others are still hearing the call or maybe even just worshipping and trying to be active. It will be the work of the church to provide the culture and environment where these people can hear the call of the Holy Spirit to a life of deeper discipleship. So local churches are tasked with the job of cultivating discipling communities within the life of the church. This way those who hear the call of discipleship will have a place within the local church to plug into without becoming separated from the overall mission of the church. Nonetheless, we ought to at least agree that discipling happens on a local level.

The Role of Pastors

Despite a culture of leadership that seeks to make pastors the center of church life, I would argue that the greatest act of leadership a pastor can display is to empower the laity to be the church. Whereas pastors can have the occasion to work with others on discipleship, they should always seek for this process to be reproductive. In other words, laity who grow into discipleship should understand that part of that growth is lived out when they help others grow as well. Pastors cannot disciple everyone. But in order to begin a culture shift in your local church, pastors can work with the first group of potential leaders in accountable discipleship. As those laity are called to lead, pastors help them plug into positions where they can help others. All of this ensures that pastors are neither the center of congregational life nor are they off the hook when it comes to discipling ministry. It’s a symbiotic relationship that forms whereby everyone grows, everyone follows, and leaders are empowered to lead.

The Role of Superintendents and Bishops

The Book of Discipline says:

“The purpose ofsuperintending is to equip the Church in its disciple-making ministry”

This raises an interesting question as to what the hands-on role of DSs and Bishops is when it comes to discipling. On the one hand, the Book of Discipline says their role is vital in helping the Church be a place where ministry happens and where disciples are formed. On the other hand, if the local church is the primary place where disciples are formed, what actual role can a DS or Bishop have given their large geographic territories? I would say that if we truly want to concentrate on local disciple formation, the greatest task a Bishop or DS can do to that end is to empower and equip pastors to lead their churches.Disciple formation is not a top-down sort of thing. Faithful discipling is always an organic, ground-up process. It’s created locally and lived our locally. Geographic districts within an Annual Conference cannot directly form disciples. Annual Conferences cannot form disciples. But good appointments can be made. Resources can be shared. Pastors can be equipped. And local churches can function effectively within the structure of an Annual Conference. All of these are primary to a Bishop or DS’s role in disciple formation.

So Who Actually “Makes” Disciples?

In short: Disciples make disciples.

Structure cannot make disciples. Structure can give disciples a place to live out their discipleship. But it cannot fully form disciples in the ways of Jesus Christ. That process is much more local, often personal, but always communal. Structure helps express a greater culture but life must thrive within any given structure. This is why structure must adapt when goals are not being met and when life does not reflect the underlying values in a culture. In the end, disciples make disciples. And it’s our job as leaders and integral parts of the overall structure to live into this. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll be spinning our wheels for many years to come.